AVOID WORKING WITH YIGAL MARKENS AT ALL COSTS

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Sorry its been such a long time. I’ve actually been really busy and things are moving. I hope you guys have seen iPokerVIP.Net is coming along leaps and bounds and I know I say it like all the time but, StudentPizza & PokerAvantage are sooo close to completion.

Anyway, the party truly has been cancelled. Party Poker affiliates are at the complete mercy of PokerStrategy (Party Poker’s biggest affiliate, owned by Dominik Kofert).

About 10 days ago I was emailed by the senior manager at Party Poker: Yigal Markens. Yigal asked to have the posistion on iPokerVIP that Victor Chandler hold and was very keen that I begin to reactive players. I was very receptive to the idea and having a rev share in players on a room like Party would certainly be lucrative. I made clear that we had to go above and beyond for our players and really offer them value.

I moved fast and could see the huge potentail this deal had.Yigal phoned me a few days after and confirmed the deal with management. He told me Party had no problem rewarding my players $5 for every 100 Party points they generated (this would be on top of the standard VIP deal).

The response from players was huge. I never got much of a response on retags from Party, they were always really slow. I got the feeling this was too good to be true. Thousands of dormant players would have been retagged and hundreds of those would have been orignally tagged to Pokerstrategy. I emailed Yigal to try get his reaction:

He never responded via email but, told me numerous times on MSN there shouldn’t be a problem.

The following mailer went out to over 1,000 of our players and associates players on VCPoker: Click Here

Responses are still coming in even as I’m typing. PartyPoker have lost some serious revenue here, more than they probably think. I think we could have easily achieve $250k+ MGR on Party, especially under their dealt rake syste which would favour the majority of players signing up via iPokerVIP. Its fair to assume the majority of these guys will not go back to Party (as long as they can’t be retagged) and Party have losts hundreds of thousands of potential revenue. Based on the email response and some of the sub affiliates I had on board the deal I think this is a pretty well justified guesstimate.

About 24 hours ago I noticed an offline message on MSN from Yigal. It said something about rakeback and breaking policy. I instantly fired off an email:

I went to slee, not really thinking about it. I figured it was a complete misunderstanding and nothing that couldn’t be resolved. After all it was obvious I had an insane volume of players to reactive.

So I got myself on MSN… Yigal blocked me within 2 minutes probably.

Jamie says: Hey ?
marky says: hi Jamie
Jamie says: Hi
Sorry I’ve done nothing you haven’t sanctioned yourself
marky says: we found many skype conversations….
Jamie says: Fair enough though if you want to terminate my account
show me…
marky says: will send you…
Jamie says: I can’t actually believe it. Apart from the $5 for 100 points
which you said was okay
Nobody who works with me or myself have done anything questionable whatsoever
marky says: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/51/affiliates-rakeback/official-ipokervip-affiliate-support-thread-760802/

Note: Not sure what this thread exactly shows apart from Korn & Co. doing anything they can to make iPokerVIP look bad.
then you offered 10% on top of VIP deal
and much much more proof
Jamie says: I may have said “this $5 for 100 points is equivalent to approxamitley 10% in value” that’s absoltley the worst I’ve done

Note: This was sanctioned by Party. I can show numerous emails where they approve my mailer to players with this offer.
Sorry what are you showing me exactly?
10% on top?
You’re joking?
marky says: this was your previous site: OMGrb.com
Jamie says: When I was 18 years old and started affiliating I offered under the table deals on the iPoker network
Please… show me the proof
marky says: sent
Jamie says: all you’ve shown me so far is a thread where over 20 well respected 2+2 members say what a pleasure it is to deal with iPokerVIP and how trustworthy we are
marky says: anyways, be happy you didnt start making money
Jamie says: I’ve done nothing wrong
marky says: We’ll let our legal department decide about that
Jamie says: Wow why is the date of that conversation not included?
marky says: you can always get back to them, but I would rather read the skype conversation before….
we have dates….
no worries
Jamie says: What date was it?
Note: This Skype convo (shown below) was from 18 months+ ago. The deal I mention in the convo wasn’t in my name and the player never signed up and policy was not actually broken. The deal mentioned in the conversation belonged to PAS. Again I have conversations backing up that the endorsed this offer. They haven’t lost their deal.
marky says: You can speak with our legal team abt those things
They will answer all your questions
Jamie says: Korn got to you right?
Someone has complained because this is fkin ridiculous
That deal isnt even my fucking deal
that’s through PAS
ban them

The Proof

The deal we had through Party was approved by management and then one day they terminated for no good reason… It all points to an outside source feeling threatend. Numerous affiliates have agreed its the work of PokerStrategy.

iPokerVIP.Net Support Chat Logs

Later today a user came online iPokerVIP.Net. As you can see below this user had never been to the site (from this IP) before and was based in Gibraltar. He hadn’t browsed any Party Poker page on our site and didn’t have any previous deals with iPokerVIP. Basically there was no way this user would be aware of Party Poker retags.

And it gets better… When the IP is backtracked it shows up about 300 metres from the PokerStrategy office.
The Red circle is the PokerStrategy office (its in one of those buildings if memory serves me) and the blue circle is where the IP has been tracked to. These things are usually a little off. I wouldn’t be suprised if I was chatting to Korn sitting in his office.

What Lessons Can Be Learned?
Don’t work with PartyPoker. If you get big there or look like you might retag a decent amount of players its game over. They don’t seem interested in running a good poker site and reactivating the thousands of dormant PokerStrategy players they have on their hands. This is not a PLC… they’re being run by an affiliate.

If you’re a player don’t count on any affiliate at Party to continue to reward you. Pokerstrategy aren’t interested in rewarding high volume players with anything tangible. Coaching, parties…sure but, this isn’t what high volume, full time players want.

What Can Be Done?
I am contacting several affiliate watchdogs and gaming publications.

When we are in Budapest and networking in future anyone thatt will listen will be told to stay away from Party Gaming.

Some Consolation

At grass roots level it appears as if a merger between OnGame and Party is imminent. There is no reason we can’t run a simlar deal at BWIN when this occurs.

The Kicker

Iwas fortunate enough to purchase a considerable number of Party gaming shares before their merger. Before I sell these I will use any possible avenue open to me (as a private shareholder) to draw attention to other shareholders and the directors how corrupt this company is and how its being run by Pokerstrategy.

I deposited some money onto PKR to check it out and overall I don’t feel the softness of games outweigh the lack of volume / rakeback which you can find elsewhere. I just can’t multi table. So I just have withdrawn $1.2k now which is not bad for a days work. Bit of a hit and run on the site. Although because the money has been transferred in and out of my account in $ I’m sure it will earn HSBC a nice £20. Always good to do my bit for them. I guess on PKR there are too many distractions for the fish / donks to spew their money off optimally. They’re getting distracted by all the little gizmos. It just hasn’t really done it for me. I prefer SkyPoker when it comes to uber soft sites.

I’ve been doing some research into some new shares to buy. Well more like thinking not much research. There just seem to be some certain undeniable truths in the west at the moment. Consumerism overall will grow, people are becoming more money oriented, lazier and our world is becoming more driven by technology. I don’t mean I’m going to go out buy HP or Sony shares because they’re too widely spread and just because tech is on the grow in the longterm doesn’t mean Sony will be. I was thinking a company involved in nano-technology.

The other company in general I quite like is Mcdonalds. Are their sales going to go down anytime soon ? Who is realisitically going to challenge them ? They just seem to have it nailed down, although maybe their price reflects this. Another company would be Nike. I just find it hard to see how their actual business isn’t going to grow. There aren’t many legitimate competitors and the market for trainers, sports clothing, fashion etc is on the up and up. The population of the world isn’t going to buy less trainers in 2010 than it did in ’09. I mean I don’t have any facts whatsoever its just hard to see. Obviously, the company can have a fundamental flaw and regardless of what market its in it just won’t enjoy the same growth.

Onto something I know more about…
I guess a few readers will have followed the ipokervip legality debate on 2+2. My guess is playtech haven’t made a firm decision and now Titan are at it.

It was suggested to me that my thread was removed from affiiates/rb forum because of the word rakeback in the forum name. My site has no mention of RB anywhere and I categorically don’t offer it. Whereas RTR and friends seem to get off with it. I guess I can live with that but, now Titan are using the word Rake and Rakeback consistently in their ad campaign. I guess it might be good for the network and at the end of the day what they’re offerring doesn’t compare to me so it has its positives but, it just goes to show how having it in with the owner of the network can do wonders for you ! Or just being the same person altogether.

As you can see on the right I’ve got players on Titan and don’t have anything against them. If you have an advantage, I guess push it as far as you can. The fact remains a lot of other skins would be afraid of doing something as bold.

Cynics will come along and say I effectivley did the same thing with iPokerVIP and I guess the difference is a) In my honest opinion I didn’t think the methodology of my offers were different b) As a business I represent myself. Playtech are a PLC and the owner owns Titan. Whereas I just want to showcase the best offers I can find and don’t want to do anything apart from give players the best. Anyway, its nothing against Titan I’d do the same in their shoes. Its going to be an interesting next few months because I’d be suprised if their was no reaction to this.

New offers should be up this week along with the support thread. May is going to be a really big month on iPoker so its defo a better time to kick off compared to August or something.

I never really recruited players for FTP because even post 3% commission their effective commission was the worst out there along with pokerstars – if you were lucky enough to get revenue share.

What I mean by effective commission is that the FTP new player market was highly competitive and saturated with races, coaching and software being offerred left, right and centre – See the recent CardRunners promotion. After the player rakes their intitial $500 CardRunners will be lucky to have profited whatsoever.

However, ipoker and ongame are arguably as equally competitive with the difference being they’re networks. As far as I know there are no players who upon signing up to FTP are raking a decent amount – which pretty much means its an investment into the players raking a decent amount in the future. Whereas on iPoker or OnGame I know when someone says to me they rake $5k there is a fair chance they’ll rake something and if I establish a good relationship with them and things are good there’s no reason I can’t make a few K from them in a lifetime.

Its not only the investment in the player’s learning curve, future disposable income and everything else that gives them the ability to generate rake but, an investment in FTP still being around as a site and online poker as an industry. For a small unestablished affiliate running races and promotions resulting in a very fine edge combined with the delay in time before real returns are realised always made FTP an unappealing option for me.

I’ve read around that this drop to 3% was long overdue for affiliates and is going to be mirrored elsewhere. I completley disagree with this statement – as long as poker networks exist so will affilaites on decent commissions. The unarguably easiest way for skins to access fast, reliable rake is to steal players from fellow skins on the network. This cannot be done by anyone other than affiliates.

Moreover, FTP and Stars enjoy great brand recognition and affiliates definatley piggy backed off this. I guess the test would be to see how many of these players would be playing at FTP if they had the same deal without an affiliate. I’m guessing close to 100%. Whereas on iPoker or OnGame the players could be at one of 30 places.

I guess the problem for affiliates on stand alone sites is if a player wants to play that site its not becuase of the affiliate its becuase of the site. But, that’s why I’m thankful about not being involved in FTP. I can’t imagine being RakeTheRake and previously earning $80k a month of the $1million rake being generated by its players and having that docked to $30k. Its a lesson in how vulnerable affilaites can be and probably offsets the great short term earnings.

Anyway, I don’t see anything changing on the networks becuase the minute it does a ton of affiliates and consequently players will move and that will be that.

I’m so tired at the moment but, am going to look over the stats and come up with a short term plan of action – basically personally emailing select players that have obviously left for another skin or site completley and trying to get these promotions into action.

Peace

1. Various conflicts of interest: As a network your primary interest is in recruiting licences and serving them well and not in providing a good gaming experience for the player. Often, these are the same thing but, unfortunatley not always. Pokerstars and FTP have a link to the players whereas ipoker and the like do not have the players contact details and so on.

2. Hung Parliament – Not sure if this is a good metaphor but, when a hung parliament occurs in governemnt i.e. 2 parties have an almost equal number of seats / power nobody is in control. I guess on the surface it sounds fair enough. You would be forgiven for thinking “Oh well that means things will really be discussed and evaluated before they become law”. History unfortunatley tells us this is not the case. Things don’t get done and no progress is made.
Poker networks arer a bit like this -Too many cooks, too many decent sized skins and cages all with differing opinions. Its a lot like government in the way that all skins are working to the same end while competing with each other to get there. I mean when you have 30 + skins or whatever it is, some of them probably run out of someone’s bedroom (or definatley in the case of OnGame skins) its hard to imagine how things would get done. Or when they get done people feel pretty pissed off. This isn’t necessarilly because of the system but, becuase iPoker isn’t equally transparent with all the skins.

Conflict of interest b)i) Playtech owns a pice of Will Hill and all of Titan Poker ii) BWIN owns ongame iii) Party gaming owns Party Poker
This is inevtiable since networks start off as skins or independent sites but, again its not exactly ideal.

3. PLC – Playtech & Party are both PLC’s. I know nothing about the stock market but I’d imagine with publically documented accounts these networks would never be prepared to go over a facelift at the risk of damaging short term figures because that damage itself would have a negative impact for the company.

4. Backwards Development
These networks all have sub-par software. Someone gave me the analogy of ‘its cheaper to repair an old house than build a new one from scratch’ – I’m not sure if that’s always true or at least it depends what kind of repairs you need doing :p ! I’ve seen a new network with hardly any players whose software blows every other sites out the water (apart from Stars – although I think I prefer it to stars personall). Its more functional than ipoker, lighter than ftp and just better to look at than all the rest. How can Playtech, a company in excess of $1bn not knock something decent up ? I just don’t get it.

5. Mass Marketing
Simply put: Running even a dream marketing campaign on the TV or sponsoring a big tourney would be a huge loser for any skins on a network (with the exception of Party possibly.) These campaigns wouldn’t necessarilly be losers for Stars or FTP though which is why they’re growing rapidly and the networks aren’t.
If I’m the owner of an iPoker skin and I decide to invest big in a TV campaign say $1 million what can I expect in return ? Well completely guessing lets say I get 10k signups ( I really don;t know if that’s realistic but, the predictions don’t matter too much for the purposes of this example). Firstly, these 10k players are not going to be the high raking variety – any serious players will hunt about the network for better promos for what is effectivley the same site. Secondly, these players are going to be bad and bust their $50 deposit pretty quickly.
So let’s say these 10k guys rake $50 a piece – after support, deposit / withdrawl costs, the 20% for the network the skin is maybe left with $250k which is nice.
The problem is the value in fresh fish is the liquidity they add to the games, your current players will rake more and win more as a consequence and the money will flow around your sites economy. This is fine if you’re pokerstars – you will enjoy the ripple effect from this liquidity injection but, if you’re an ipoker skin with 15% of the network 85% of the liquidity of the fish is being enjoyed by players on other skins.
Furthermore, its not as if iPoker would be capable of putting network ads out it would just confuse people.

6. Finally we have the networks giving away licences like they’re going out of fashion. They’ve realised this is -ev now I think but, it doesn’t make things easier it just further complicates them.

I’m tired now but, I could go on forever. I’m not even going to get into win/ loss or the lack of RB cap. Basically a lot of these problems are never going to be fixed and the answer lies in a new network that has learnt from the mistakes of ipoker. Again this is easier said than done and several large skins would need to jump ship in sync. If stars and ftp don’t go down I really think this is what needs to be done. Based on pokerscout they’re just running away with it and its not even because they’re amazing or unbeatable. Its simply becuase the alternatives are pretty flawed.

So before iPokerVIP launches I’ve focused on player retention a bit and am sending out email newsletters to all my players – Such as this one: http://www.ipokervip.co.uk/newsletters/feb/news.htm

Unfortunatley I’ve not been particuarly organised with regards to my players details and have had to build a database from scratch, which isn’t hard but, just time consuming. Paid someone to do it a few months ago and they just made a huge mess of it.

I’ve had some pretty good feedback from the newsletters and hopefully it makes a real difference and lets my players know I care about them.

Anyways, the stats were only marginally worse and I was absolutley chuffed. I guess months like this are the reason affiliates aren’t so hard working or at least have that reputation.

After weighing my stats up with some guess work I guess I’mresponsible for around 3% of iPoker network’s MGR which is pretty awesome and with my new site and a few more concepts in the pipeline I don’t really see why 7.5% or something isn’t sustainable.

The horrible thing throughout January was the pool of potential signups hadn’t particuarly decreased but, the ability to access them had with 2+2 tightening up and me just trying to protect my current player base. Again hopefully my vip site will change all of this. I’m just impatient.

All in all I’d be pretty happy with Febuary yielded similar figures to January and at least then I can be sure I have a great consistent thing to build off in the future.

These guys follow or at least pretend to follow the school of thought that ‘your players rake x and at the moment you only earn 3% of x but, we earn 10% of our x’.

The the conversation goes something like:
Me: “So what would seperate me from you guys in terms of new customers ?”
Them: “Customer service”

I honestly don’t know if they really believe this themselves but, I’ve never heard such a pile of BS.
FTP has a capped network % and its literally impossible for new affiliates to break-through as a consequence.

If you look at the major players when it comes to capped network RB they’re not the ones with the best service, they’re the ones who give the most value (see: Cardrunners with HEM and Coaching, RakeTheRake with freerolls and huge rake races). So when these people come to me and say lower my deals becuase its killing the industry and its fair I don’t see why I should when what they’re doing is just as bad.

Another problem with this whole cartel or capped % thing is it needs to be heavily policed – so what I agree with a bunch of sites not to offer x% ? That just leaves on affiliate to clean up offerring a bit more.

Operating with thin margins is just good business sense in this industry. At the end of the day I’ve got an asset in all the relationships I’ve got with my players (even if they don’t play anymore), their contact details and more leverage with the skins to work with better margins myself becuase of the player base I built up.
In fact to anyone starting out as an affiliate struggling to compete I’d probably go as far to reccomed taking a minute % to begin with (granted you will make pennies in the 1st few months) and when you’ve got a decent player base, go to the skin and ask for a higher %. Then your cut will be comparable to that which you would have recieved offerring standard deals at the beginning and your player base will be twice the size.

Again I’m sure I’ll edit this and add to this post as I go along.